The main issue is the fear of rivals stealing data. The second one is: will I be able to publish? And that depends on the publisher. Most publishers regard what we do as the equivalent of presenting at a conference, or a preprint. That hasn’t been tested across a wide range of publishers, and there’s at least one — the American Chemical Society — that doesn’t allow prepublication in any form whatsoever. There’s also a legitimate concern that a lot of people will put out a lot of rubbish.

And JC Bradley’s view of an open notebook:

The basic philosophy of open-notebook science is to have no insider information. Essentially all the information that is available to the [research] group is available to the rest of the world. You have an objective, a procedure and a log section, in which you report what you actually do.

These is far more to be said about sharing data and the use of open notebooks. Both Cameron and JC Bradley have written about their experiences on their blogs. I’d recommend snooping around because there is much to read.

Just a few days ago, an article by Declan Butler was published in Nature regarding PLoS‘ open-access publishing model. This article was not well accepted by various open access advocates and science bloggers in general.

What I find to be the most notorious aspect in this whole string of events is that there is quite a large community of science bloggers that are ready to offer their “peer-review” in situations such as these. Is this a good thing? I would like to believe so…